I didn’t understand how June couldn’t hear me. Alive, we could practically read each other’s minds. Being dead doesn’t mean you don’t feel things. In fact, your feelings flow out all over the place until you feel like you’re drowning in them. So why couldn’t she pick up on them?

Frustration, desperation, sorrow—they crashed through the space I was occupying like tidal waves. The fading away brought some relief. It happened quickly, as it always does. Like a sleep brought on by strong drugs.

Before I evaporated from the room completely, June threw back the covers, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed.

“Okay, May. I’m up.”

JUNE

I would never tell anyone this, but I’m pretty sure my sister is haunting me. Sometimes I hear her voice and am sure I smell her. Every person has their own scent, and I know May’s better than anybody’s—even my own children’s. Their smells change from one age to the next, each new stage introducing something foreign. May’s is warm skin and cinnamon—always has been.

Haunting isn’t the right word. I don’t believe in ghosts. Plus, May would never haunt anybody; she’d watch over them, protect them. It’s more likely, though, that it’s just pure longing that conjures her voice and smell, the imprint of her on me so strong it has residual effects.

But one day a few weeks after she’d died, in the middle of the afternoon, I was sure I heard her tell me to get out of bed. Not so much heard it as felt it. May’s always been bossy, in that older-sister way that makes you feel loved and repressed at the same time.

Imagined or not, it got me out of bed. I showered for the first time in days and ate something. When my girls came home from school, the relief on their fourteen-year-old faces almost made me cry. Twin girls should have understood better than anybody the devastation of losing a sister, but for some reason they just didn’t grasp my debilitating sorrow.

I faked my way through the making of dinner, the helping with homework, the watching of a sitcom. Just enough to give them back some sense of normalcy. Then I sent them to bed, intentionally ignoring the devices they had subtly tucked away in the pockets of their hooded sweat shirts so they would comply.

Once the house was in darkness, I closed my bedroom door and released the dam of tears that had accumulated while I was playing at normal. The next morning I slept through their departure to school and slipped right back into the dysfunctional zone.